Indiana legislative committee studying criminal sentences | POLL

INDIANAPOLIS - After seeing Gov. Mitch Daniels' proposed overhaul of Indiana's criminal sentencing laws collapse under its own political weight, state lawmakers are trying a different approach ahead of next year's legislative session.

A panel assigned to delve into the issue this summer is splitting it into four parts — theft, drugs, sex crimes and sentencing — in hopes of isolating and ironing out each item before 2012's 10-week session.

That plan was unveiled Thursday by Sen. Richard Bray, the Martinsville Republican who is chairing the Criminal Code Evaluation Commission. The group includes House and Senate members as well as other judicial system officials.

The commission is authorized by legislative leaders to meet as many as 10 times between now and Dec. 1. Bray has not scheduled the next meeting, and said he is not yet sure how many times it will meet.

But, he said, next time they'll focus on thefts, and they'll get into more weighty and controversial issues later in the summer.

Daniels has proposed transitioning low-level drug and theft offenders out of prisons and into community-based programs. The punishments would better fit the crimes and the state would spare itself of the cost of building new prison space, he has argued.

But county prosecutors have pushed back, saying that allowing criminals to leave jails earlier as a result of a fiscal crunch is no solution.

"Hopefully we get to what I believe to be the most important issue — sentencing — during this study commission. It's the key to recidivism and other things," Taylor said.

"I believe part of the reason we have such high unemployment is because people feel like they can't obtain an occupation or employment because of felonies they might have had in the past," he said.

Indiana Chief Justice Randall Shepard, an Evansville native, said he hopes that the panel this summer will work through disputes over its statistical analysis of Indiana's criminal justice system.

That, he said, was a major impediment last year.

"There is a little value in going over the same ground, just because there were people who put up their hands and said, 'I think these numbers are bogus,'" he said.

When analyzing statistics on property theft-related crimes, he said, it would be useful to have a broad analysis of how many of those convicted stole $10 versus how many stole $1,000.

The goal, he said, should be that "when you get to the moment of truth, people still aren't arguing about facts; they're arguing about policy."

Bray chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, and another Martinsville Republican, Rep. Ralph Foley, is the point man on sentencing reform in the House.

He expressed the same frustrations as Shepard, though he said he already has a comprehensive package of sentencing reforms that he intends to introduce next year no matter the outcome of the summer study committee.

"The critical thing is to define what we are measuring. I thought we were extremely distracted by unproductive arguments over what we were measuring" last year, Foley said.

For example, he said, the Indiana Department of Correction counts individuals in beds at its prisons. It also counts people who are under the department's jurisdiction but not necessarily imprisoned.

"Different people are citing different figures trying to measure the same thing. Those inconsistent results cannot be explained unless you understand what you're measuring," he said. "It's my goal that we're all talking apples to apples."

As for how lawmakers can get past the political problems that scuttled sentencing reforms during the 2011 session, Foley said, "with a better attitude."